April 10, 2013

March 27, 2013

McGill-Queen’s is honoured to be introducing Seyhmus Dagtekin’s evocative work to an English audience for the first time. Dagtekin's To the Spring, by Night is the magical evocation of a childhood spent in a small Kurdish mountain village in Turkey, with no electricity and little literacy, but with a rich tradition of tale-telling and legend that infuses every living thing, every rock, stream, and spring with its own spirit and inner life.

We follow the young protagonist as his horizons expand and share his real and imaginary fears as we come to know his isolated community, whose only contact with the outside world is through the male inhabitants' compulsory military service and the smuggling that takes them down from the heights and onto the plain below. Changing seasons, family intrigues, feast and famine, all run their course in the shadow of an imposing citadel overlooking the village, long ago abandoned by mysterious forerunners who may have left a hidden treasure behind. At a graceful pace, details emerge about the village's history until a shocking truth is revealed.

Join us here for a conversation between the author of To the Spring, by Night, Seyhmus Dagtekin and translator Donald Winkler.

Seyhmus Dagtekin is a Kurdish poet and writer. Writing in Kurdish, Turkish, and French, he is the winner of the Mallarmé Poetry Prize, 2007, and the Théophile Gautier Poetry Prize, 2008. He lives in Paris.Donald Winkler is a prolific filmmaker and Governor General's Award-winning literary translator. He lives in Montreal.

March 25, 2013

For Man by Pope Francis I

When I gave the lecture
on which this chapter is based during the presentation of the Spanish edition
of Luigi Giussani’s book The
Religious Sense, I was not
simply performing a formal act of protocol or acting out of what could seem to
be simple professional curiosity about a work bringing into focus an
explanation of our faith.1 Above all, I was expressing the gratitude
that is due to Msgr Giussani. For many years now, his writings have inspired me
to reflect and have helped me to pray. They have taught me to be a better
Christian, and I spoke at the presentation to bear witness to this.

Msgr Giussani is one of
those unexpected gifts the Lord gave to our Church after Vatican II. He has
caused a wealth of individuals and movements to rise up outside the pastoral
structures and programs, movements that are offering miracles of new life
within the Church. On 30 May 1998, in St Peter’s Square, the Pope met publicly
with the new communities and ecclesial movements. It was a truly transcendent event.
He asked specifically for four founders from among the many movements to give
their witness. Among these was Msgr Giussani, who in 1954,
the year he began teaching religion in a public high school in Milan, initiated
Communion and Liberation, which is present today in more than sixty countries
in the world and is much beloved by the Pope.

The
Religious Sense is not a
book exclusively for members of the movement, however, nor is it only for
Christians or believers. It is a book for all human beings who take their
humanity seriously. I dare say that today the primary question we must face is
not so much the problem of God – the existence, the knowledge of God – but the
problem of the human, of human knowledge and finding in humans themselves the
mark that God has made, so as to be able to meet with Him.

Fides et Ratio

By happy coincidence,
the presentation of Giussani’s book was held the day after the publication of
Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides
et Ratio, which opens with this
dense consideration:

Moreover, a cursory
glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world,
with their different cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental
questions that pervade human life: Who
am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is
there after this life? These
are the questions which we find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in
the Veda and the Avesta; we find them in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze,
and in the preaching of Tirthankara and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of
Homer and in the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, as they do in the
philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are questions which have
their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the
human heart. In fact, the answer given to these questions decides the direction
which people seek to give to their lives.2

Giussani’s book is in
tune with the encyclical: it is for all people who take their humanity
seriously, who take these questions seriously.

Paradoxically, in The Religious Sense little is said about God and much is said
about human beings. Much is said about our “whys,” much about our ultimate
needs. Quoting the Protestant theologian Niebuhr, Giussani explains that “Nothing
is so incredible as an answer to an unasked question.”3 And
one of the difficulties of our supermarket culture – where offers are made to
everyone to hush the clamouring of their hearts – lies in giving voice to those
questions of the heart. This is the challenge. Faced with the torpor of life,
with this tranquillity offered at a low cost by the supermarket culture (even
if in a wide assortment of ways), the challenge consists in asking ourselves
the real questions about human meaning, of our existence, and in answering these
questions. But if we wish to answer questions that we do not dare to answer, do
not know how to answer, or cannot formulate, we fall into absurdity. For man
and woman who have forgotten or censored their fundamental “whys” and the
burning desire of their hearts, talking to them about God ends up being
something abstract or esoteric or a push toward a devotion that has no effect
on their lives. You cannot start a discussion of God without first blowing away
the ashes suffocating the burning embers of the fundamental whys. The first
step is to make some sense of the questions that are hidden or buried, that are
perhaps almost dying but that nevertheless exist.

March 21, 2013

Celebrating the best Canadian scholarly books across all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, the Canada Prizes are awarded to books that make an exceptional contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written, and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

Jury's citation: "François-Marc Gagnon, Nancy Senior, and Réal Ouellet have prepared a stunning bilingual edition of two remarkable and little-known manuscripts: the Codex Canadensis and the Histoire naturelle des Indes Occidentales by Louis Nicolas, one-time Jesuit missionary to New France. The picture-book of the Codex and the description of the Histoire naturelle provide fascinating and fresh evidence for how a seventeenth-century European understood the peoples, flora, and fauna of the New World and for how lives were lived and bodies adorned among First Nations peoples. In a masterful introduction and extensive notes, François-Marc Gagnon unravels the mysteries of the dating and authorship of the manuscripts, identifies the flora and fauna, and recreates Louis Nicolas’ mentality, still infused with late medieval ways of interpreting nature, yet open to surprising observation. Réal Ouellet’s fine edition of the Histoire naturelle holds on to its lively French prose, while making its spelling and archaic words accessible to the modern reader, and Nancy Senior’s English translation adds to the pleasures of the text. Beautifully produced by the Gilcrease Museum and the McGill-Queen’s University Press, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas is a gift to the peoples of Canada and the world of scholarship beyond."

The Codex Canadensis has also won the 2012 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the 2012 Melva Dwyer Award and is a selected entry for the AAUP Book and Jacket Show.

March 20, 2013

The following is excerpted from The Hill Times article McLean learned a lot inside the NDP’s war room:

In the 2005-2006 federal election campaign, Jim McLean, a professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal and co-editor of Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives, left his day job to “volunteer” in the NDP war room in downtown Ottawa.

“There was no question that Paul Martin was fighting for his political life and that the Harper Conservatives smelled blood,” said Mr. McLean.

The 56-day campaign election was a game changer.

On Jan. 23, 2006, Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper won his first minority government with 124 seats, defeating Liberal prime minister Paul Martin whose party won 103. The NDP, meanwhile, won only 29 seats, the Bloc Québécois won 51, and there was one Independent elected.

Mr. McLean spent about half of the election campaign in the war room. Assigned to a corner of someone else’s desk beside the war room manager in the building the NDP owns at the corner of Bank Street and Laurier Avenue West, the NDP’s leading strategist Brian Topp allowed Mr. McLean in to monitor the media and to observe war room tactics. “But as an outsider, Mr. McLean was also watched closely, treated with suspicion, and not encouraged to come to the daily morning strategy sessions.” However, that didn’t stop him from wandering the war room and spending a lot of time talking to a lot of people. The result is his unique and intelligent perspective of what it’s like inside a federal political war room and his book, Inside The NDP War Room: Competing for Credibility in a Federal Election.

What did you do in NDP war room?

“This was the 2005-06 election campaign. It was 56 days long, but that’s a bit misleading because it stretched over the Christmas break, so there was about a week of down time right in the middle. For my part, I was assigned the corner of a desk to ostensibly help with media monitoring. This was at campaign headquarters in Ottawa, in the building that the NDP owns at the corner of Bank and Laurier. I was in the war room physically for about half the campaign, but I also went out to see how war room tactics were playing in communities that were close enough to travel to: Montreal for example.

March 18, 2013

Seyhmus Dagtekin, a Kurdish poet and writer born in Turkey but living in Paris, gently unfolds a story that reads like a cross between a memoir and a sacred text. Told in the first person and set in an unspecified past, the novel chronicles one boy’s childhood in an isolated Kurdish village in the mountains of Turkey, where every spring, rock, and falling star has a story that must be remembered and understood. Few names are given, little dialogue used, and the impersonal and inclusive pronouns “we” and “us” predominate, but the text is richly embroidered with myth and legend, political and social history.

Oral tradition informs the narrative, which focuses thematically on the way memory works. Repetition is used throughout as a unifying tactic. The repeated word “gaze,” for instance, recalls the story of tortoises that opens the book. “And so,” Dagtekin writes, “... tortoises have prolonged their time on earth thanks to their slowness and steady gaze that looks beyond the signs all beings make and sees them in the light of their earliest awakenings to the world.”

(...)

Metaphorically dense and clearly told, this novel is a remarkable feat of storytelling that tempts the reader to dig further into the mysteries of the story and seek out more information about the history that informs it.

March 14, 2013

Journey with No Maps is the first biography of P.K. Page, a brilliant twentieth-century poet and a fine artist. The product of over a decade’s research and writing, the book follows Page as she becomes one of Canada’s best-loved and most influential writers. “A borderline being,” as she called herself, she recognized the new choices offered to women by modern life but followed only those related to her quest for self-discovery. Tracing Page’s life through two wars, world travels, the rise of modernist and Canadian cultures, and later Sufi study, biographer Sandra Djwa details the people and events that inspired her work.

Sandra Djwa is professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, and the prize-winning author of The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott and Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells.

The Moncton author, now in his 66th year, is still making politicians and bureaucrats squirm. His latest book,Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?, challenges the widely held belief that government should be run like a business.

(The title — likely to puzzle non-Maritimers — came from a conversation Savoie had with a leading Canadian businessman. The Nova Scotia-born magnate had grown up in a small village where the music teacher, a provincial employee, worked alongside the two-person bureau of the Department of Natural Resources. “Today we are told we can no longer afford a music teacher in our community,” the businessman said. “However, the Department of Natural Resources is now housed in two fine buildings employing 150 people.”)

To Savoie, this anecdote encapsulated what has happened to Canada’s public service over the past 30 years: front-line workers have been sacrificed to make way for offices full of paper-pushers, managers, supervisors and evaluators. “It is ill-conceived, costly and misguided.”

The bottom-line doctrine took hold under prime minister Brian Mulroney, who decided the public sector should operate with the same market discipline as private enterprise. His four successors have adhered to it slavishly.

It has never worked and it never will, Savoie says.

(...)

The remedy is obvious, Savoie says with the same clear-sightedness that once scandalized his boss. Figure out what a government department is supposed to do, then fit the employment level to the workload.

Ottawa still won’t like it, but this time it comes from a man with a global reputation for smart public policy at a time when taxpayers want to know why they pay so many bureaucrats to provide such poor service.

March 06, 2013

The following is excerpted from a Huffington Post guest post by Peter Trent, author of The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal.

Just over ten years ago, two hundred municipalities all over Quebec were merged against their will. Some were amalgamated into megacities. The governing Parti Québécois had no mandate to do this; moreover, pleading the "urgency" to act, they refused to consult citizens. Besides, we were told, mergers would save money and redirect suburban taxes to the central city. Mergers were supposedly a world-wide trend and had always been imposed in Quebec. None of those claims was true.

Once the legislation imposing the mergers, Bill 170, was rammed through Quebec's National Assembly, there remained only two strategies available to me in fighting a law that wiped out so many municipalities including my own. We could try to overturn Bill 170 in court; and, failing that, to force the opposition Liberal Party to honour their increasingly flaccid promise of "de-merger." The two strategies were interlinked: pursuing the matter in court kept the public's ire on the boil, long enough for the Liberals possibly to get elected and -- with a little help from me -- to bring about the world's first urban de-merger.

March 05, 2013

Thirty years ago, Anglo-American politicians set out to make the public sector look like the private sector. These reforms continue today, ultimately seeking to empower elected officials to shape policies and pushing public servants to manage operations in the same manner as their private-sector counterparts. In Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?, Donald Savoie provides a nuanced account of how the Canadian federal government makes decisions.

Savoie argues that the traditional role of public servants advising governments on policy has been turned on its head, and that evidence-based policy making is no longer valued as it once was.

February 28, 2013

Since the
creation of Canada in 1867, and even before, school structures and ethnicity
have been closely associated in Quebec. The British North America Act (BNAA),
which made education the exclusive prerogative of the provinces, provided
protection not to linguistic groups but to religious minorities, such as
Protestants in Quebec. The Act’s provisions attest to the
preoccupations of the French Canadian group who wanted to make certain it
controlled education, at least in the province where it was clearly the
majority, and to the religious sensitivities of the time. Very quickly,
however, the system structured itself on the basis of a dual cleavage that
associated language and religion, since these two identity markers were largely
congruent. Francophones attended French Catholic schools, almost exclusively,
while anglophones attended English Protestant schools. The arrival of
immigrants who fit into neither group made the situation more complex. When they
were Catholic, they chose the English Catholic schools. Non-Catholic immigrants
separated themselves almost evenly between the English Protestant schools and
the private ethno-religious schools.

Beginning in
the 1970s, the choice of English schools by immigrants and their descendants,
formerly encouraged so as to preserve the “French Canadian” character of the
French Catholic schools or simply tolerated as a natural phenomenon, became identified as a major
social problem. A declining birth rate among francophones and the linguistic
assimilation of immigrants by the anglophone community seemed to threaten the
fragile francophone majority. By now this group saw itself not as a minority
group in Canada but as a territorial majority in Quebec. It refused to accept
that it did not represent the host community for the newcomers. In this context
a package of linguistic laws, particularly the 1977 Charter of the French
Language, known more popularly as Bill 101, was adopted by the Quebec
government. These laws were principally aimed not at transforming the
anglophone community’s linguistic attitudes and behaviours but at breaking its
monopoly on the integration of immigrants, which was now to become the
responsibility of the francophone community.

February 27, 2013

Which brings me to the biggest disadvantage of being Canadian. You practically have to destroy the planet to get anyone’s attention.

There are simply not enough of us. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way things are here on the tundra.

We don’t have the numbers. As a result, we don’t have the book sales. Or the magazine circulation. At least, not enough to hold back the cultural tidal waves coming from New York, from Hollywood, from Downton Abbey.

It’s not that Canadians believe that everything happens elsewhere. We remain admirably delusional in this regard. It’s just that everything does happen elsewhere. Or so it so often seems in the sharply observed, beautifully written memoirs that pour, unstoppable, from the British and the American literary scenes.

This particular genre — the realm of Grub Street gossip and Algonquin Hotel bon mot, envy and ambition, hard work and low pay — does not seem to thrive in Canada. George Fetherling’s The Writing Life: Journals, 1975-2005 will be published this April. It is a welcome exception to this miserable rule.

(...)

It’s interesting to wonder what the stature — and the income — of a writer as good and as multi-talented as Fetherling would be in a New York or London context.

Being a poet, a novelist and an accomplished journalist is not an easy combination to pull off anywhere. It’s practically a high-wire act in Canada.

The constant subtext of Fetherling’s journal is money and a Canadian writer’s lack of it. And yet . . . the talent stacks up. His thumbnail sketch of the Canadian historian Douglas Creighton is no less sharp and no less incisive than the kind of writing one expects to find in The New Yorker.

February 21, 2013

Celebrating the best Canadian
scholarly books across all the disciplines of the humanities and social
sciences, the Canada Prizes are awarded to books that make an exceptional
contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written, and enrich the social,
cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales

Edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet

Part art, part science, part anthropology, this ambitious project presents an early Canadian perspective on natural history that is as much artistic and fantastical as it is encyclopedic. Edited and introduced by François-Marc Gagnon, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas showcases an intriguing attempt to document the life of the new world - flora, fauna, and aboriginal.

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas shows how the wildlife and native inhabitants of the new world were understood and documented by a seventeenth-century European and makes available fundamental documents in the history and visual culture of early North America.

The Codex Canadensis won the 2012 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the 2012 Melva Dwyer Award and is a selected entry for the AAUP Book and Jacket Show.

After a tumultuous career as a revolutionary in Ireland and an ultra-conservative Catholic in the United States, Thomas D'Arcy McGee moved to Canada in 1857, where he became a force for moderation and the leading Irish Canadian politician in the country. Determined that Canada should avoid the ethno-religious strife that afflicted Ireland, he articulated an inclusive, broad-minded nationalism based on generosity of spirit, a willingness to compromise, and a reasonable balance between order and liberty.

As someone who took an uncompromising stand against militants within his own ethno-religious community, and who attempted to balance core values with minority rights, McGee has become increasingly relevant in today's complex multicultural society.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2 won the 2012 Canadian Political History Prize and was shortlisted for the 2012 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 1 won the 2010 Raymond Klibansky Prize and is the co-winner of the 2008 James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize.

February 20, 2013

Julie Wilson: You were approached directly by P. K. Page write this biography. I'm curious to know, how does P. K. Page ask someone to relay her life's story?

Sandra Djwa: I think that choosing a biographer is a kind of dance between subject and biographer. I had seen P. K. read at the Vancouver International Writers Fest in the late '80s. There was deep emotion in her voice when she spoke about her father—she said they had not reconciled. This led me to wonder about her life and whether she would have a biography. P. K., in turn, had seen me writing F. R. Scott’s biography. P. K. and her husband, Arthur Irwin, had been very helpful when I asked them about topics relating to the 1940s and 1950s. [Editor's note: Page and Scott had an affair.]

Then, in 1987, both P. K. and I were shortlisted for the BC Non-Fiction Prize. I arrived one evening for dinner at her home in Victoria and found Arthur reading my F. R. Scott biography, and liking it. A few years later, I wrote a paper about biography and P. K. asked me if she could read it. My impression at the time was that she did not want to have a biography. I think now that she was probably sussing me out for some time before she decided to take the plunge.

P. K. phoned one morning in December 1996 when I was making Christmas cookies. She asked, quite directly, would I like to write her biography? I said I would. We agreed to get together in Victoria in the New Year to discuss the matter. Later in February of 1997, and again in September of that year, she sent a formal letter authorizing me so write her biography and stating that I would be free to interpret her life as I saw fit.

February 18, 2013

The following is excerpted from the Maclean's article The life of P.K. Page: Exclusive excerpt from a new biography: A riveting portrait of an artist as a young — and old — woman:

When the respected scholar, author and critic Sandra Djwa embarked on Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page more than a decade ago, she had no inkling of how challenging or far-flung the expedition would be. It’s the first biography of the charismatic, convention-defying female poet and painter who inspired a generation of writers, including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro. The St. John’s, Nfld. native, whose prior studies of CanLit include acclaimed biographies of Roy Daniells and F.R. Scott, calls it “the most difficult book I’ve ever written.”

Djwa, 73, first read Page in 1962. “It was an astonishing poem about first love—simple, delicate, yet fierce.” In 1970, she invited the poet—by then P.K. Irwin after marrying diplomat (and former Maclean’s editor-in-chief) Arthur Irwin—to address her class at Simon Fraser University, where she taught Canadian literature from 1968 to 2005 and is now a professor emeritus. Djwa’s first impression of Page? “Oh, quick, quirky, witty, somewhat temperamental. You never knew what to expect.” In 1997, when she was 80, Page approached Djwa to write her life story. Part of their agreement was that Page would submit to interviews but would not have final say over the book’s content, which delves into her complicated love affair with the married F.R. Scott in the ’40s. Biographers have one responsibility, Djwa says: “To tell the truth, as much as you can know it.”

Establishing that truth could be challenging. “P.K. was all over the place,” says Djwa, referring to Page’s peripatetic life. She was born in England in 1916, zigzagged across the Prairies as a child, settled in Montreal in the ’40s, then travelled with Irwin when he was posted in South America and Austrialia, locales that inspired her colourful, lush landscapes. In the mid-’60s the couple returned to Victoria, where Page died in 2010.

February 14, 2013

Medicare is more than laws and regulations. As the Romanow report
(2002) pointed out,
from the beginning medicare has been an expression of our care for one another.
As some other writers have said, it is as binding an element of Canadian life today
as the railroads that connected East and West in the nineteenth century. Our
medicare is a commitment Canadians made to one another more than half a century
ago. In times of need brought on by health problems, we will continue to help
each other financially. Medicare is ours. It is not the beneficence of governments,
be they federal or provincial. Nor is it the goodwill of health care
corporations. However much appreciated, it is not even the kindness of
front-line health care professionals: physicians, nurses, equipment
technicians, medical administrators, and hospital orderlies. All those simply
represent the will of the people fed by a spirit of generosity and care for one
another.

Canadians sometimes forget this fact, and who can blame them? In a
country as large as ours, with a population steadily growing and now well over 33 million, we
need complex organization to give expression to our generosity. Our generosity
gets to be mediated, almost overshadowed, by organizations. Many hospitals and
drug companies are involved, and these institutions often obey their own
primary rule: “got to be looking good.” Governments want to appear to be the
source of citizen wellness, be it economic, social, or medical. Drug companies stress
the presumed benefits of their chemicals and suppress their often highly
questionable marketing strategies. Physicians don’t always possess superb
bedside manners, and some believe they hold the key to unlocking the secrets of
the human body and must be regarded with a special type of awe. However, the work
of all of these contributors to the health care system, even the kindest of
nurses, only happens because of the generosity of the more than 33 million
neighbours who share our country, those we know and those we don’t know: our
tax dollars pay for all of the costs of the Canadian health care system. This generosity
sets the context for our medicare and must be kept in mind in any discussion
about how to change the system.

Click below to view news stories on Canadian medicare across the country.

February 13, 2013

"Who am I," asks the narrator in an early poem, "Arras," by P.K. Page, “or, who am I become...?” (144). It’s a question Page was to return to many times, in both her literary and visual art; but it wasn’t a simple question the way Page posed it, and it didn’t make possible a simple answer. Page’s thinking about herself and her identity was not the usual sort; she was asking the question on a different level than simply trying to situate herself as a woman or Canadian or ambassador’s wife or poet, writer, artist. She was asking how “I” bring something into being; asking who is the self who engages in perception; asking about the multiple selves; asking about the relation of the temporal self to eternity; asking about the individual spirit in relation to the unmapped infinite. The challenge for her biographer was to meet Page in that enquiry, and yet at the same time, to write the life story in a way that was appealing to a reader interested in chronological sequence and in how Page’s life work as a writer and visual artist meshed with her life events.

As Sandra Djwa brings out this first and fascinating biography of P.K. Page, she locates the question of Page’s identity in diverse contexts: in the exciting social history of Canada through a time of two world wars and much change, especially in the lives and careers of women; in the evolution of modernism among Canadian writers and artists; and in the global setting of humanity in the space age.

February 06, 2013

As the world struggles to meet the growing international demands for electricity, green energy, and alternatives to fossil fuels, the nuclear power sector is experiencing global growth. Nuclear reactors are being designed and constructed at record rates, and Canada is joining the trend, with several provinces considering an expansion of their nuclear presence.Canada, the Provinces, and the Global Nuclear Revival critically by Duane Bratt examines Canadian nuclear policy in order to show how historic, environmental, economic, and political factors have shaped the direction of the nation's energy industry.

February 05, 2013

I was struck by the predicament of P.K. Page, a diplomat's wife in Australia, circa 1953. She's then a fine poet in her mid-thirties, new to the country and without a poetic community. She's given up the man she loves and feels isolated, notwithstanding a sustaining marriage to Arthur Irwin, Canada's High Commissioner to Australia. Although she's brought a manuscript of poems from Canada, she's too scared to publish, despite high praise from American poet critic Cid Corman. He wants to publish her work in Origin, his avant garde little mag: "10 pages, 20 pages, 40 pages," however many pages she can give him. I was touched and amazed to discover that while sitting in the lush embassy garden in Australia, where peaches "hang like lanterns," Page wrote a poem called Arras where she expresses her feeling, reflects on poetic process and resolves some of her problems while discovering -- through the writing of the poem -- that art remedies grief and isolation. Arras is a story told by a first person narrator, apparently a young woman, about a tapestry. Like Alice in Wonderland she steps into the world of art (the arras or wall hanging) and is conscious of a splitting of identity (between her creating self and her creation). Panicked, longing for "a hand to clutch, a heart to break," she tries to bolt but is held by an immense and threatening stillness. It is at this climactic point that she has an epiphany: " I confess, it was my eye." That is she acknowledges the role of the artist's imagination (and creative eye) in developing the raucous peacock now projected upon the screen of the arras.

January 31, 2013

Better Living through 'Pataphysics: The Biosemiotics of Kenneth Goldsmith by Adam Dickinson

In early
March of 2008, two environmental activists, Rick Smith
and Bruce Lourie, sequestered themselves in a Toronto apartment for four days
in order to perform an unusual experiment. They deliberately exposed themselves
through daily activities to a variety of common household substances, such as
personal-care products, plastic food containers, and furniture treated with
stain repellent. In addition to taking regular blood and urine samples, they
passed the time watching cable news and playing “Guitar Hero.” The purpose of
this unorthodox experiment, which the authors likened to a science fair
project, was to measure levels of common pollutants in their bodies, pollutants
that have received little study in the context of quotidian human use, despite,
in some cases, being known carcinogens. Inspired by the “body burden” testing
initiatives of the US-based Environmental Working Group in the late 1990s, Smith and Lourie’s experiments, outlined in Slow Death by Rubber Duck, focus on their own bodies as sites of
environmental contamination. The goal of their science project is to change the
way people think about pollution, emphasizing how “We have all become guinea
pigs in a vast and uncontrolled experiment” where we marinate daily in a cocktail
of chemicals through food we eat, surfaces we touch, and creams we absorb. By making their own bodies guinea pigs in this experiment, the
authors redefine conventional notions of toxicity, making pollution a matter of
not only acute, external, geographical concern, but also one of chronic,
internal, biochemistry.

The
unconventional and highly personal methodologies practiced by the authors
represent a political intervention into the systematic science that governs
environmental regulation and corporate interest. Where
traditional science depends on anonymity, the whole point of “body burden” testing
is to be public and personal. Moreover, there are significant gaps in existing
scientific testing on these chemicals: “For some chemicals, like bisphenol A (BPA), there are virtually no human data available at all”. Consequently,
these authors were inspired to create an alternative scientific practice, one
which proposed an imaginative solution to a question no one had thought to ask:
what happens if we try intentionally to raise and lower the levels of certain
chemicals in our bodies?

Such
questions evoke the pseudo-scientific methodologies of ‘pataphysics, where
science and art intersect as research practices and mutually engaged
discursivities.

(…)

The
implications for environmentalism are obvious in the case of Smith and Lourie. What
are we to make, however, of the implications for literary environmentalism –
or, ecocriticism – of ‘pataphysical experiments that, while textual, bear some
similarities to the experiments performed by these activists? Take Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, for example. During a week in 2001,
this American poet strapped a hidden microphone to his body and recorded his
daily conversations. The resulting poem, published in 487 pages and seven “Acts” corresponding to the days of the week,
presents only Goldsmith’s side of his conversations, splicing comments together
in a catalogue of the various communicative environments he experienced that week.
The constraint-based, ‘pataphysical poetics applied to the gathering of “data”
in the poem suggest the methodological strategies of scientific experimentation,
where variables are controlled in order to apprehend a particular environment
in a particular way.

January 29, 2013

A second
important difference is that monitoring and regulatory activities in the labour
process devoted to transgenic animals are exceptionally concerned with the
well-being of the technologies beyond their physical health. The Canadian
Council on Animal Care suggests in a policy statement that “in the interest of
well-being, a social environment is desired for each animal which will allow
basic social contacts and positive social relations” (CCAC 1990). Ted Benton
(1993) suggests that this distinctive sociality of animals has already shaped
labour processes centred around the transformation of animal life into food.
And Nexia concurred with respect to its spider-goat hybrids:

Goats are
naturally playful and social animals; therefore Nexia uses group housing for
its herds. We encourage their playfulness by providing them with toys that
stimulate them both mentally and physically. These measures help keep the goats
happy. Since happy, healthy goats are more productive and produce more milk,
the environmental enrichment program is highly beneficial from both an ethical
and economic perspective.

In short, a
good social life makes for a happy factory and a happy factory is a productive
one. A blurring of the boundary between life and technology typical of transgenic
animals is perhaps no better indicated than by this emphasis on the sociality,
playfulness, happiness, and well-being of industrial technologies.

January 24, 2013

The other
external shock was the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident. Although
it is still too early to determine its full effects, the early results reveal a
couple of things. First, the accident will be used as evidence by both nuclear
coalitions to support their respective policy beliefs. The anti-nuclear
coalition will use it to highlight pre-existing concerns over reactor safety,
radiation exposure, and nuclear waste disposal, and these attacks will be
rebutted by the pronuclear coalition, which will stress the relative absence of
death and injury resulting from the nuclear accident, especially in contrast to
the earthquake and tsunami. Second, it does not appear to have altered the
nuclear agenda of any of the policy brokers in Canada. Ottawa still went ahead
and sold off aecl’s reactor division to SNC-Lavalin, Ontario went ahead with
the public hearings that were required for its new nuclear build project, and
Point Lepreau is still being refurbished. Both the Alberta and the Saskatchewan
government reiterated their previous nuclear stance, although with a lot more
enthusiasm in Saskatchewan. Only in Quebec was there an apparent policy
reversal resulting from Fukushima-Daiichi when the Charest government delayed
the refurbishment of Gentilly-2 pending more analysis. However, even in Quebec,
this simply reflected a stronger anti-nuclear sentiment that had existed in the
province before Fukushima-Daiichi. For example, in
2008 only 22 percent of Quebecers supported nuclear energy in their province. This support plummeted even lower to only 17 percent in
polls taken in June 2011.
Quebec has, by far, the lowest
support for nuclear energy in the country.

January 21, 2013

Aboriginal Music in Contemporary CanadaEchoes and ExchangesEdited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond

First Nations, Inuit, and Métis music in Canada is dynamic and diverse, reflecting continuities with earlier traditions and innovative approaches to creating new musical sounds. Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada narrates a story of resistance and renewal, struggle and success, as indigenous musicians in Canada negotiate who they are and who they want to be.

Comprised of essays, interviews, and personal reflections by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal musicians and scholars alike, the collection highlights themes of innovation, teaching and transmission, and cultural interaction. Individual chapters discuss musical genres ranging from popular styles including country and pop to nation-specific and intertribal practices such as powwows, as well as hybrid performances that incorporate music with theatre and dance. As a whole, this collection demonstrates how music is a powerful tool for articulating the social challenges faced by Aboriginal communities and an effective way to affirm indigenous strength and pride.

In Time and Philosophy, John McCumber presents a detailed survey of continental thought through a historical account of its key texts. The common theme taken up in each text is how philosophical thought should respond to time.

Looking at the development of continental philosophy in both Europe and America, McCumber discusses philosophers ranging from Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, and Derrida to the most influential thinkers of today - Agamben, Badiou, Bulter, and Ranciere. Throughout, McCumber's concern is to elucidate the primary texts for readers coming to these thinkers for the first time, while revealing the philosophical rigour that underpins and connects the history of continental thought.

Badiou's Deleuze presents the first thorough analysis of one of the most significant encounters in contemporary thought: Alain Badiou's interpretation and rejection of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Badiou's reading of Deleuze is largely laid out in his provocative book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Badiou's Deleuze presents a detailed examination of Badiou's reading and argues that, while it fails to do justice to the Deleuzean project, it invites us to reconsider and reassess Deleuze's power to address the ultimate concerns of philosophy. Badiou's Deleuze analyses the differing metaphysics of two of the most influential recent continental philosophers, whose divergent views have helped shape much contemporary thought.

January 16, 2013

"Michael John DiSanto’s Under
Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism explores the roots of Conrad's
writing, especially in nineteenth-century thought. Here DiSanto focuses on
Conrad’s reading, examining among his predecessors specifically Carlyle,
Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche and analyzing the manner in
which Conrad's reading of their texts is evidenced in his fictions both as
continuation and as argument. The complexity of Conrad's thought, DiSanto
argues, 'is rooted in his knowledge of these writers.' In closely examining
this relationship, this study also demonstrates how Conrad’s art itself ‘offers
a reassessment of their work.' DiSanto's book makes a strong contribution to
Conrad studies." Adam Gillon Award jury member.

January 15, 2013

Peter Trent'sThe Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal is a finalist for the Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

About the Award

The finalists were selected by a jury of politician and political scientist Ed Broadbent, columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, and novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin. The prize will be presented in Ottawa at the Politics and the Pen Gala on March 6, 2013.

Now in its twelfth year, the prize is awarded annually to a non-fiction book that captures a political subject of interest to Canadian readers and enhances our understanding of the issue. The winning work combines compelling new insights with depth of research and is of significant literary merit. Strong consideration is given to books that, in the opinion of the jury, have the potential to shape or influence Canadian political life.

About The Merger Delusion

Powerless under the country's constitution, Canadian municipal governments often find themselves in conflict with their provincial masters. In 2002, the Province of Quebec forcibly merged all cities on the Island of Montreal into a single municipality - a decision that was partially reversed in 2006. The first book-length study of the series of mergers imposed by the Parti Québécois government, The Merger Delusion is a sharp and insightful critique by a key player in anti-merger politics.

Peter Trent, mayor of the City of Westmount, Quebec, foresaw the numerous financial and institutional problems posed by amalgamating municipalities into megacities. Here, he presents a stirring and detailed account of the battle he led against the provincial government, the City of Montreal, the Board of Trade, and many of his former colleagues. Describing how he took the struggle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, Trent demonstrates the ways in which de-mergers resonated with voters and eventually helped the Quebec Liberal Party win the 2003 provincial election.

As the cost and pitfalls of forced mergers become clearer in hindsight, The Merger Delusion recounts a compelling case study with broad implications for cities across the globe.

January 10, 2013

Today’s guest blogger is John S. Long. Prof Long's award-winning book,Treaty No. 9, uncovers early twentieth-century approaches to negotiating land claims, focusing in particular on the 41 First Nation Nishnawbe Aski Nation/treaty affiliations in Northern Ontario, covering the land south of Hudson Bay and James Bay, and extending from the Lake of the Woods on the Manitoba border to the town of Kirkland Lake near the Quebec border. Prof David McNab describes the book as “a piece that will forever change our understanding of Treaty No. 9.” Prof Long’s expertise in this area provides both a context for Chief Theresa Spence’s demand to meet with PM Harper and the Governor General, and a counter argument to those who dismiss native claims to constitutional priority.

Treaties are not just Constitutionally-protected and backed by the United Nations. They are how indigenous peoples and their territories became part of Canada. The indigenous peoples inhabiting the vast watershed draining into James Bay in far northern Ontario arguably agreed to join Confederation through Treaty No. 9. What were the terms of union?

Three treaty commissioners appointed by the Crown travelled through far northern Ontario in the summer of 1905. Treaty No. 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905 reproduces historical sources and lets the reader decide what happened. There are two scenarios.

Commissioner Samuel Stewart wrote in his journal that “full explanations” were given and the original peoples agreed to the terms of a complex written document whereby they “cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada for His Majesty the King and his Successors forever, all their rights, titles and privileges whatsoever, to the lands.”

Commissioner Daniel George MacMartin, a miner nominated by Ontario, said in his diary that Treaty No. 9 was explained orally this way: the commissioners had been sent by the King, the monarch wished his people to be happy and prosperous, and - as soon as they signed their names - everyone would receive gifts in perpetuity.

Commissioner Duncan Campbell Scott (like Stewart, a career Indian Affairs employee) seemed to confirm MacMartin’s account when he later wrote: “They were to make certain promises and we were to make certain promises, but our purpose and our reasons were alike unknowable … So there was no basis for argument. The simple facts had to be stated, and the parental idea developed that the King is the great father of the Indians, watchful over their interests, and ever compassionate.”

The written version goes on to say that indigenous peoples may continue to hunt, trap and fish – subject to government regulation, and not on lands which may be “taken up” for mining, forestry, settlement and so on – and they must obey the law.

MacMartin wrote that two issues were always raised by the original peoples. What about our hunting and fishing? You can hunt and fish as you always have. Do we have to live on a reserve? You don’t have to live there until you choose. There is no regulation of hunting, trapping and fishing, and no mention of government regulations or laws or lands being “taken up,” in the oral version.

Either way, treaties are nation-to-nation agreements that can only be changed only through negotiation. Governments who attempt to make changes without indigenous consent arguably put Confederation at risk.

January 09, 2013

McGill-Queen's is delighted to announce that Journey with No Maps: A Biography of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa is a finalist for the the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction. The Charles Taylor Prize recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing and emphasizes the development of the careers of the authors it celebrates. The winner of this year's prize will be announced at a gala luncheon and awards ceremony at The King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto on Monday, March 4th. More information here.

This January is the anniversary of the 1998 ice storm, which remains fifteen years later the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history and affected the most people. It was also the worst disaster in the history of Maine. For some people, it resulted in only a candlelight dinner of cold cuts, but for 300,000 people it meant shivering in the dark for almost a month in the coldest, darkest part of winter. Thirty people died in Canada and another seventeen in the United States. An inquiry referred to the disaster as “confronting the unforeseeable” because it was worse than the worst-case scenario that had been foreseen. For everyone it was a reminder, perhaps now forgotten, of how dependent we have become on the electrical grid and how vulnerable it is to extreme weather. There has been little media attention over those fifteen years to the most dangerous day when freezing rain crushed transmission towers and lines cutting off power for Montreal’s water filtration plants and pumps. Water had been stored in high reservoirs, so the supply continued to flow by gravity, but it was rapidly being depleted. The worst danger was fire. Live local electrical wires from the one remaining transmission line had fallen on trees and houses; generators would overheat without water to cool them; previously unused fireplaces and chimneys were being overused by people desperate for heat; and candles were pressed into service for light. Any of these could result in fire, but there would be insufficient water to extinguish it, and the fire could spread through the city, particularly if there was wind. San Francisco burned down in a three-day fire after the earthquake of 1906, in 2012 Hurricane Sandy caused major fires in New York City, and a similar fate threatened Montreal in 1998 during a period of heightened risk of fire but insufficient water to extinguish it. The geography of Montreal made the possibility of fire more perilous, as described by Hubert Thibault, chief of staff for Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard: “the bridges were closed because of ice that was falling on the vehicles. That was a situation which was difficult to manage. Everyone was trapped: the population was trapped on the island of Montreal.” Thus Mr. Thibault concluded that “we were on the threshold of a catastrophe of great scope”. Mayor Pierre Bourque agreed that Montreal had a very close call and added that “people never really knew what had happened”. Leadership in Disaster: Learning for a Future with Global Climate Change presents insider information about what happened and investigates how leaders managed the crisis and what could be learned from their experience for extreme weather in the future when climate change threatens to make it more frequent and severe. The investigation does this through in-depth interviews with highly placed political and emergency management decision-makers in Quebec, Ontario, and Maine.

Raymond Murphy is emeritus professor and former chair of the deparment of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Ottawa and past president of the Environment and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association.